Stream

That thing where you're combing through the comments on Pebble Time and you find +Scott Beaudry asking a completely reasonable question about a potential additional feature he noticed in the Pebble Time Steel intro video (beeps!).

As a completely reasonable question in an online comments forum, it is thus destined to be ignored.﻿

Long story short, Library and Archives Canada is planning to select an American company, OCLC, as its vendor for a new union catalogue. Which means #privacy concerns (due to the USA Patriot Act) as well as hopes that the new solution will meet the federal government's #opendata mandate and maybe even bring a dash of linked open data to the table.

But with bill C-51 looming on the horizon, maybe Canadians have no hope for privacy of their usage information anyway.﻿

I attended a meeting with Library and Archives Canada today in my role as an Ontario Library Association board member to discuss the plans around a new Canadian union catalogue based on OCLC's hosted services. Following are some of the thoughts I prepared in advance of the meeting, ...

Not an envious position indeed. Although just than conundrum highlights, IMO, the benefit of substantial and ongoing public investment in information systems management, when its obviously in the public's interest to have the information managed be freely available (such as government data and library catalogues).﻿

Seeing this show was certainly the highlight of my Valentine's Day weekend. Soooo many laughs. Such a great cast! The Toronto run has been extended for a fourth week, so tickets should be available; if you can go, I highly recommend it.

Communities

Nice site pulling together search-related info for apps and the web. Doesn't appear to have new info (e.g. events are still limited to music) but it's a great design and clearly a good foundation for rolling out future info.

For nearly two decades, Google has been helping web developers connect their content to their users. But in today’s world, information can be found in apps, as well as websites. That’s why, today, we’re announcing Google Search for Developers, a single destination for information about all of the APIs that you can use to integrate with Search. To learn more, watch the video with +Jarek Wilkiewicz below, and visit https://g.co/developersearch to get started.﻿

Keanu is what I felt like when I first understood the relationship of between JSON-LD and triples :) And yes you are totally right +Dan Scott, this iteration of the site is mainly about putting everything in one place so it is easy to find by Developers. ﻿

Further to +Renaud Lepage saying that +Google Wallet should have launched in Canada because we've had the infrastructure for two years, and me responding "four years at least!", here's an old Vancouver Sun article from September 2011 mentioning MasterCard's launch of its PayPass NFC sticker for phones--which I remember happening at least a year after they added NFC to my credit card and I started using it at grocery stores, etc.

Back in 2011, the article said PayPass transactions account for nearly 10 per cent of all MasterCard credit card transactions in Canada

Riffing on the $440K it costs to support a set of Code for America fellows in a city for a year, +Mita Williams says:

If only there were people who could also help cities help their communities who didn’t have to be flown in and disappear after a year. If there was only some group of people who could partner with cities and their residents who already had some experience and expertise in open data licensing, and who understood the importance of standardizing descriptors in datasets, who were driven to improve better user experience, and who understood that data use requires data literacy which demands both teaching and community outreach.

On Friday the 13th, I gave the morning keynote at the Online Northwest Conference in Corvallis, OR. Thanks so much to the organization for inviting me. Last October, I was driving home from a hackathon when I heard somethin...

A few years ago, when RDFa Core 1.1 and RDFa Lite were being created by the elders (+Gregg Kellogg​​, +Niklas Lindström​, +Dan Brickley​, +Manu Sporny and apologies to anyone I missed​), a debate came up about search engine specific attributes like rel="nofollow" that would clash with other real intentional properties in RDFa.

Checking the following record in Google's new Structured Data Testing Tool and the Structured Data Linter suggests that, in fact, no decision to treat these search engine hints specially was ever agreed on.

Is the recommended approach then to include vocab="" on elements that use @rel="nofollow"? Seems like a hack, but better than prefixing every schema.org attribute and type, or switching to microdata...

Some of my #devstudyjam friends know what this is all about. Yay for Sudbury / metric weather data!

I've now completed lesson #2 of the Udacity "Developing Android Apps: Android Fundamentals" course. It's not too late to join in the fun if you happen to be in Sudbury, at least, but you have some catching up to do: http://www.meetup.com/GDG-Sudbury/﻿

Great vegetarian Indian cuisine. I'm a repeat visitor over the past ten years; it's always been good. Service is variable, but that's too be expected from any restaurant. Prices are in line with the norms for the quality and quantity of food served up per dish.

Casual atmosphere (a dress shirt is way over the top for this place), excellent Thai food. I had a bowl of tom yum soup; the portion size was small but it was packed with flavour. By far the best tom yum I've had (and I've tried a lot). Also had the green curry, which more than met expectations in flavour, presentation, and serving size. Highly recommended.

I've been to Ripe many times since moving from Toronto; it's like one of the Yonge & Eglinton pasta & wine bars was transported to Sudbury. It benefits from a creative menu, nice woodfired pizza oven, generally great service, and an owner (Marc) who genuinely cares for his clientele.
For example, last night we presented a coupon for a free kid's pizza at the start of our order and enjoyed a great meal. When the bill came, we paid and took off quickly because said child was very tired, and didn't notice that the coupon hadn't been applied. Marc (somehow) remembered my name, tracked down my email address, and sent me an email apologizing for the oversight and promising to make it up to us... completely unprompted. How awesome is that?

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I've been to Ripe many times since moving from Toronto; it's like one of the Yonge & Eglinton pasta & wine bars was transported to Sudbury. It benefits from a creative menu, nice woodfired pizza oven, generally great service, and an owner (Marc) who genuinely cares for his clientele.
For example, last night we presented a coupon for a free kid's pizza at the start of our order and enjoyed a great meal. When the bill came, we paid and took off quickly because said child was very tired, and didn't notice that the coupon hadn't been applied. Marc (somehow) remembered my name, tracked down my email address, and sent me an email apologizing for the oversight and promising to make it up to us... completely unprompted. How awesome is that?

I've been multiple times over the past twenty years; first as a student for my first Ethiopian experience, most recently as a parent with two overtired children in tow. I've never failed to have great, attentive service (especially impressive patience with said children!) and wonderful food. One of my favourite places to visit in Toronto.

Perhaps the best Indian cuisine I've had, including the ten years I lived in Toronto. The dishes, rice, and naan are freshly prepared when you order, and the portions are generous; two main dishes are more than enough for three people. They don't hold back on the spice; if you order "hot" you will get very hot, and I love that :)

The conference rooms and general facilities are fine, but the distance from anything else means that you're limited to whatever food they have to offer--which means high prices and no guarantees of quality.
I made the mistake of grabbing an English muffin with egg and some meat slices from a heat rack on a cart in the morning, and once I opened it discovered that the sauce had soaked through the bottom of the sandwich and bonded with the wrapper. Seems likely that the sandwich had been there since the day before. I tried a few bites anyway but ended up tossing the $5.50 monstrosity; luckily my stomach didn't seem too affected by the experience.

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The conference rooms and general facilities are fine, but the distance from anything else means that you're limited to whatever food they have to offer--which means high prices and no guarantees of quality.
I made the mistake of grabbing an English muffin with egg and some meat slices from a heat rack on a cart in the morning, and once I opened it discovered that the sauce had soaked through the bottom of the sandwich and bonded with the wrapper. Seems likely that the sandwich had been there since the day before. I tried a few bites anyway but ended up tossing the $5.50 monstrosity; luckily my stomach didn't seem too affected by the experience.